A Train ride out of the Big Land: Labrador City the Train The Railway:When my father would get his annual holidays we would usually end up going to our ancestral home on the Island of Newfoundland. We rarely flew. More often than not we would drive from Labrador City, making the road trip a part of the adventure. And the adventure would start long before the vacation! My parents would plan out the route, which was not a simple task in my early days, the 1960s. The Trans Canada Highway did not exist like it does today. The Trans Labrador Highway was not even a dream! The drive down through the Maritimes was a series of blacktop, gravel, detours and ferry crossings, and it took days. A couple of weeks before the vacation we would have to have the car ready to go. Any luggage we were taking with us that we could not carry onto a train would have to be packed up and placed in the car. Then Dad would arrange to have the car placed on the train and shipped down to Sept Isles. This alone could take up to two weeks. You see, the railway, the Quebec North Shore & Labrador is the main line out of Labrador (and all of it's Iron Ore resources) to the coast. When ore is ready to roll it rolls. Anything else on the tracks gets put off to a siding until the ore train passes by. I recall many times sitting in the train car waiting and waiting...and waiting, until eventually a seemingly endless train would go rumbling by. The earth itself shuddered with the mass of it snaking along. Anyway, once the vehicle made it to Sept Isles it would be unloaded and kept in a yard with Security. I think the security was 'B.I.P.', an acronym that I don't know. Once you arrived a few weeks later the paperwork got done and the vehicle released to you and off you went.Meanwhile, back in Lab City the family would be getting ready for the train ride on their own. My mother would prepare a cooler full of food to last us the whole trip and pack enough clothes etc so that we would have enough to do us until we sprung the car form security. All the other families that were going on holidays at that time would be doing the same thing. The big day would come! We all would get dropped off over at the Rail Station and wait. Train travel in Labrador was a lot of waiting, especially for a very excited kid. The Rail Station was green as I remember, as well as purplish/blue of Iron Ore dust of course. There was a cigarette machine, a water fountain and a vending machine that produced some of the vilest liquids you ever tasted. This is something I discovered later in my life when old enough to be taking my own car on the train. As a young boy I never tasted anything from the coffee vending machine. I think there may have been a bar and chip vending machine as well but somehow I can't really remember. Maybe I was never allowed to have anything from it because we had a packed picnic cooler. There was always cigarette smoke...always. Most of the grownups were smokers in those days and standing around waiting provided the perfect opportunity to have a smoke, or two or three, and shoot the breeze about just about anything, many conversations were about the routes people would follow to various parts of the 'Outside'. River crossings were discussed, detours and benefits of staying on the North Shore until Quebec City, rather than crossing at Baie Comeau or Godbout. This eliminated the need to have a river crossing by boat but it added many hours driving in the opposite direction from the destination. My Dad opted to take a boat, which is also what I do every time I've done the drive. That way, unless you were lucky enough to make the crossing, you have a few hours waiting, but that's a chance to sleep or simply take a break from sitting in the car, to get up and walk about smelling the smells of salt air and the chatter of Frenchmen, wondering what they're talking about. One game I used to play was to see how many white beluga whales I could count in the St. Lawrence River. Another was to try to be the first person to see the boat coming into view beyond the horizon and then anxiously track its painfully slow approach. Forever waiting. I'm getting ahead of myself...back to the Railway station. After eternity had come and gone, a few times, the train engine would come rumbling up to the platform with a car or two in tow. In a fairly short time all hands would be loaded aboard and families would select their seating arrangements for the next twenty odd hours. There were always families aboard that I would know...some of the kids would be in my grade or at least close enough in age to play with. As the trip progressed we would have run of the cars but initially everyone sat with their own. The seats on the QNS&L Railway Cars could face either direction, or face one another so amidst the excitement much twirling around of chairs happened, until a parent would bawl out to us to stop spinning them around. Then 'BANG'! The car would lurch violently forwards or backwards, and shudder as the engine engaged and started pulling us back and forth the tracks. The train never just hooked up and left. It always ended up going up the track to one of the several little warehouses along the track, then back to the station, then another warehouse, then...and so on. More eternities passed by and you suddenly realized you were headed away from the station and towards the Wabush Bridge! Then the train would stop, perhaps to give everybody an opportunity to look close hand at iron ore trains on the next several sidings, to give one the time to contemplate just why we were all there in that part of the earth to begin with. Iron Ore. The main building block of steel. It was exciting to think about the pelletized rock concentrate lying in the next train was on its way to markets around the world! To make the buildings, ships, automobiles, toys, eating utensils for the planet! And it was dug up and processed right where I was growing up. I'm almost giddy now just thinking about those days. At long last, after coming up with every acronym and rhyme one could think of to match the numbers and letters on the side of the ore cars, the passenger train would start to roll, ever so slowly. Looking out the window on the one side you were looking down on the cars and trucks going back and forth between Wabush and Labrador City, perhaps seeing someone you knew, and waving frantically hoping they would see you off on your way to a grand new adventure. Out the window on the other side was Big Wabush Lake. Twenty miles of cold, Labrador Water, and the tailings site for the Iron Ore Company’s concentrator operations. Then the train would abruptly pull away from the road and into the woods, gathering speed all the while. Everything shook and jostled back and forth, lunging and lurching, tugging and oh, the sounds! Squeals of the wheels as the combination would round the corners, clakclakclakclakclakclalclakclakclak and rumbling, hissing of God knows what, and as the train would approach a spot where the Javelin Road would cross the tracks, or where there was a possibility of Railway employees in the vicinity, the trains whistle. Horn it was. Loud, very loud and it shouted out frighteningly 'get off the tracks! I'm coming through!!' Past the end of the Wabush Airport and its service road, past the tailings slop of the Wabush mines operations, Floral Lake (ironic isn't it that a pristine lake so aptly named becomes the mud hole for the mining operation?), past the last of the Javelin Road crossings, and into the Hinterland of Western Labrador. The only indication that mankind has been here at all is the snaking rail bed and the sandpits dug out of the hillsides used in the construction of the railway. The Big Land it is called. From some of the plateaus it is easy to see why it's called that. Seemingly Labrador goes on forever, Black spruce, Birch, flies and Animals. We travel eastwards at first following the chain of lakes that had only been fished by white men for a couple of decades, past the site of the Ashuanipi Cabins, which nowadays would be called an 'Adventure Tourism' interest, but in those days it was a fish camp. That was another thing about the train; you could arrange to get off the train to go trouting at any of the countless lakes and river systems along the route and then in the evening you could flag down a returning train and catch a lift home. You won't do that today I wouldn't imagine.The train line, actually the portion of it that went into Labrador City and Wabush was a branch line to the main one from Schefferville to Sept Isles. The termination of the first leg of the journey was at a place called Ross Bay Junction. Ross Bay Junction There's a huge rock in Ross Bay Junction. It's split roughly down the middle and it's nearly as big as a house. At least that's what I remember it looking like. It rests very near the tracks where the train stops (and starts and stops and starts...). A couple of hundred feet in behind the rock there's a duplex house just like the ones in Labrador city from that period. It's as though when the building supplies were being shipped into Lab City, a house fell off in Ross Bay. I think that's where the crew who work there are housed or perhaps it's the offices. There's a few more buildings scattered around the sandpit, and that's about it. But this is where the 'mainline' comes. The big passenger train with the dining car and the many different pullman style cars and the bar service, and the variety of people! There were French, there were English, there were natives (in those days we all called them simply 'Indians' but things have changed, gotten more ‘Politically Correct’. I've grown more worldly and know considerably more about these people now), there were so many people that seemed so exotic to me as I would wander up and down the train cars. The smells of those cars are very poignant even now...stale alcohol, tobacco, food cooking, body odour - humanity on the rails in a train car. That was the train we would wait for in Ross Bay Junction; sometimes for hours. Our car would be pulled onto a siding and left. Abandoned as far as I was concerned. And man was that boring. Once the train that brought us out from Lab City had gone along its merry way back to town a quiet stillness settled over our train car. All that could be heard was the constant buzzing of flies and the conversations of people, their voices raised occasionally to get a child to do or not to do something. Now and then there would be the crackle of a railway man's radio uttering something completely undecipherable to me. I gathered based on talk amongst the men immediately following the radio crackle that it usually had something to do with where the Mainline was. Then there would be either moans or applause but still there would be waiting. To this day I credit my time as a child traveling in and out of Labrador with my ability to wait for long periods of time for boats, planes and trains. When you think of Labrador most often it is not about heat. In fact, it can get quite hot in the summertime. It is not uncommon to have a run of hot weather with the temperatures around 100 degrees F for a few days at a time. Inside a train car it is unbearable! It was a run of those summers that I remember train travel. I'm sure that some years we traveled when it was not hot but they don't stand out so vividly in my memory. Ross Bay Junction can be a desert! After a lot of waiting we would finally hear the Mainline...it would scream right past us on our siding then be gone! What the heck happened to it? Well, it would be gone to another part of the track to drop something off or pick something up in the Junction and eventually would be back to jostle us about some more until finally, we were on our way southward. The excitement was intense once again! Up and down the train we kids would race, much to the dismay of our parents I'm sure. Sometimes we would stand in the platform area between the cars where the open-air eddied around our heads and the two cars rubbed against one another squealing like cats. This was no doubt a dangerous practice because it wouldn't have taken much to fall out. As far as I know, nobody ever did. The first four or five hours of the train ride were thrilling. The next ten to twelve were not. By the latter, everybody aboard was worn out and cranky. The world's most breathtaking scenery had become ho hum. The adrenaline rush of the tunnels and bridges (the train always seemed to stop with the passenger cars at midspan - like it was planned that way - I can just imagine the conductor and the engineer over a few beers "did you see the look on those kids faces? Terrified they were! har har har") had come and gone. Now it was dark or getting dark and the best thing to do was sleep. But who could sleep? What with all the banging around and rocking and rolling the best you could manage were a few moments here and there; nothing close to rest. And this went on forever as well. The only break that you might get would be if the passenger train had to go off onto a siding for a period of time (sometimes and hour or more!) to wait for one of the mile long ore cars to drill on by. After all, the ore cars could not be deterred. They were money on the way to market. At the darkest hour we would rumble into Sept Isles. All hands would practically cheer although most that would come out would be 'thank God'. We would gather our belongings and disembark the rail car. Our stored luggage we could get from the luggage car but usually we didn't have any because that would take a long time. Dad would go to the security shack with his paperwork and we would stay with Mom either in the station or on the platform. I don't quite recall the details but it seems like it was always cool, probably due to the late hour and the proximity to the St. Lawrence River. Also, there was always a lot of chain link fence and clanging gates.Then Dad would drive up in ol'Betsy, the 1964 Chevrolet Biscayne that I knew for many, many years. I can remember when Dad brought that car home in 1964. I stood in front of it and stared eye to eye with her headlights. I grew up with her. We would pile into Betsy and my parents would navigate us out of Sept Isles and onto the North Shore Highway. This road was nothing more than a two lane blacktop with reflective paint on the edges but to me, growing up where the only road besides town streets was a couple of miles of gravel, it was the biggest highway I'd ever been on. The North Shore Highway careened around cliff edges, raced down hills, climbed up mountains, traversed long flat stretches and often was lost in fog...or rain, or both. There's no doubt in my mind that more than one person has lost their life on that road. Some portions of it are so desolate that you may not see another car for hours. One year we went on holidays in October because that's when Dad's holidays came due. This incidentally was probably one of the times that the train ride was not hot. In fact now that I'm writing this I can see in my mind’s eye the little wood stove at the back of the rail car, and cold is the memory. As well, I can visualize looking out the back end of the car at the tracks because the passenger car was often the end of the train. I see snow on the hillsides and covering the tufts of weeds and random foliage along the rail bed. October in Labrador can be uncomfortable but inside the rail car with the wood fire in was cozy...sort of. Anyway, we got into Sept Isles late in the night. It was clear and frosty and cold on the platform. Eventually Dad got the car and he, mom and I piled in. Off we headed into the night down the north shore towards the ferry. At some point along the line we stopped to have some food from our cooler and while we were snacking the police came along. The guys weren't just out on a routine check. They were looking for members of the French Canadian terrorist group, the FLQ. Seems these jackasses were just after murdering two people, martial law was, or was about to be, invoked in the province of Quebec and we were out driving around in the middle of the night on a deserted highway. The officers checked us out and saw that we were what we were. They urged us to move on and don't stop for anybody who wasn't an officer of the law. There was danger in the air. I was young so I didn't know much about the politics of what was going on but I knew something was definitely different and serious. It was the first time I had seen a real machine gun. I think it was an M16 like the soldiers in Viet Nam were using at the time. Now I was close enough to smell the gun oil. I've seen many guns since and each time I feel certain unease. When I think back on how dangerous the potential was on that night I thank God that there wasn't an encounter with killers because I'm sure that an English speaking family with a young child would have made a good bargaining chip for desperate men. To this day I have not felt entirely comfortable on the Quebec north shore of the St. Lawrence River, nor really in Quebec. I suppose it is a paranoia brought on from those early days, because all of the Quebecers I've ever know personally have been very much like everybody else I've known; basically good people and friendly and a lot like Newfoundlanders. Their politics are radically different from their personalities. That's a puzzle that I haven't figured out. I suppose the same could be said about everybody.